Information systems have important strategic impact on global business including industrial sectors like retail, manufacturing, services, healthcare, insurance, telecom and government. Each information system in the industrial sectors house-keeps transactions internally, supports processes and hosts business decisions. Further, each industry provides a platform to enable other industries to integrate and coordinate business processes. Since the transactions and processes associated with each industry is different, there is a challenge in supporting change in environment. In order to support change in the environment, the industries constantly request for change in supporting infrastructure. The change can be effected either by at least one of (i) changing the configuration of the underlying components and the relationships among the components (ii) modifying existing components to cater to the change and (iii) building new components and establish interrelationships between the components in order to satisfy the change.
Conventionally, the change in the information system is effected by following a reverse engineering process till the causes for change in the information system are manifest, followed by a forward engineering process in order to produce the new information system that satisfies the changed requirements. Further, the old information system is brought down and the new system is put in its place and brought up so that the desired changes can be supported. It is evident that there is considerable business latency from the conception of change to its implementation. Such a situation is not desirable for businesses. Moreover, the information systems are statically composed at design time or the run-time composition is statically defined at design time and orchestrated at run-time. Hence there is a challenge in providing flexibility, extensibility and customer-centric services.